New column yesterday, sort of a meditation on bass. I talk about Skrillex and our shared love for Aphex Twin’s “Flim”, Sistol, jungle, Beats by Dr. Dre, and the idea of fidelity.
Mark Richardson
I'm the editor-in-chief of Pitchfork and I wrote Zaireeka, a book in the 33 1/3 series about the Flaming Lips album.
Resonant Frequency | Reviews | Highlight Reel | invisible music | twitter | email | "Ask"
Resonant Frequency | Reviews | Highlight Reel | invisible music | twitter | email | "Ask"
Columns I wrote this year:
Music and Dreams
Linda Perhacs, Death, Bobb Trimble, Robert Lester Folsom, and the enduring allure of the seldom-heard cult record. Here I tried to get at why we’re so drawn to obscure artists and how their backstory can affect the way we hear them.
Nine Short Pieces on the Smiths
This year a fantastic bootleg of unreleased Smiths material circulated, and I took that as an opportunity to write about one of my favorite bands.
Some Kind of Trip
Explored one of my favorite subjects: the emotional appeal of sound as sound. More generally, discussed sound quality, David Mancuso, Bill Callahan, Klipsch speakers.
Watch the Sound
Along with another column, below, my favorite thing I wrote in 2011. I talked about rap, fear, agression, and why I can be drawn to music that expresses feelings very different from who I imagine myself to be.
Marked
My “10th Anniversary Column,” more or less. I talked about what got me interested in writing Resonant Frequency in the first place, and tied that in w/ a word about EMA’s “Marked”.
Disintegration Loops and Simplesongs
I wrote this about music and 9/11 and the difficulty of making art about something horrifying.
Taking Pictures of Taking Pictures
Along with “Watch the Sound”, my favorite piece from 2011. I wrote about Lana Del Rey, David Lynch, Dirty Beaches, and the idea of music-making as re-blog. By some margin the most popular column I’ve ever written in 10 years of doing this. That’s what a piece about Lana Del Rey gets you!
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
87 plays
Silver Jews
“Like Like The The The Death”It seems certain that in twenty years, Silver Jews will be one of those rock curiosities. Like Be-Bop Deluxe, or another one of those sort-of brilliant, sort-of lost bands Julian Cope is always writing about. This notion makes me really sad.
I know there are others who like Silver Jews, and many who love them. I once started a single serving Tumblr devoted to transliterating lyrics onto Some E Cards. (Browse, but don’t bother following it, because it’s an endless task, and my name isn’t no Sisyphus.) The current of music, poetry, and thought probably won’t take us toward the more elliptical and breathtaking maneuvers pulled off by Berman (or Malkmus or Tate). That’s too bad, but it’s also true. Sort of a law, or at least a bill. A prolific epigrammatist a must be something like a natural abomination.
Everybody’s coming back to Christmas for Texas.
Before there were in-jokes on the internet, there was Silver Jews. Now, people feel really clever (or self-actualized) posting three-frame GIFs of Annie’s boobs (sic). But there used to be kids in cars huffing dusters and singing along with Dave Berman’s words. It’s fine. We get it. I’m old. Old and sad sort of go together.
I am older (and sadder). And once I wrote this column about David Berman’s lyrics.
New Resonant Frequency up today. I wrote about Dirty Beaches, Retromania, David Lynch, Lana Del Rey, and music-making as re-blog. If you follow me here you may have seen me talk about a few of these things in 2011.
New column up today — first one in a few months and first one with this new image (what can I say, I like plants.) It’s about 9/11 and music and the difficulty of art that makes use of recent tragedy and it also has a bit about the avatar I use in most places online.
This week Pitchfork has been doing a 15th Anniversary thing, with features looking back at the site and talking to artists about music since 1996. We introduced it here and you can find everything we published here. I’m proud of how it turned out, and I’m especially proud of the piece 15 Writers/15 Songs, where some our contributors talked about a song that meant something to them during this period. We also had three fantastic interviews, with Björk, Beck, and ?uestlove (be sure to check out the latter esp., it is wildly entertaining).
Today we ran a retrospective feature where we highlighted some of our best features over the years. Many of our columnists chose their five favorites. These were the Resonant Frequencies I chose.
- Not Magic Yet
tUnE-yArDs, Christina Aguilera, and ideas of beauty and self-loathing. - Watch the Sound
On rap music, fear, aggression, Swans, and what happens when we feel music but don’t necessarily identify with it. - Green Eyes and the Other Guy
The intimidating prospect of making a mixtape for a new girlfriend who has heard everything. - YouTube and Memory
The astounding implications of the ever-growing digital archive. - Soothing Sounds for Hipsters
An early piece on the intersection of ambient music and new age.
Reblogged from marathonpacks|25 notes
Andy Beta, “A New Age for New Age Music.” (via marathonpacks)
Great piece from my friend Andy Beta. It reminded me that I wrote a column in 2002 called “Soothing Sounds for Hipsters” that talked about some similar ideas, only then I was grappling w/ new age in the context of Gas and Kompakt’s Pop Ambient comps. It’s interesting how these ideas cycle in and out of culture over time.
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‘I always enjoyed the idea that krautrock was considered highbrow, yet New Age textures signaled something more cheesy and lowbrow,’ said Lopatin. ‘But there’s also a superficial dissolution of the ego in both New Age music and Western mysticism that I find amusing.’ Animal Collective’s Brian ‘Geologist’ Weitz agrees: ‘I think the reason there is a stigma attached to a lot of New Age music is because of the personalities associated with it and the naive optimism to their aesthetic.’
New Age music preached spirituality, environmentalism, self-evolution and the like, yet when musicians and the major record labels saw the successes that an auteur like Halpern had with his cottage industry, big money soon followed. ‘New Age music was one of the very first completely amateur-driven genres,’ said Mcgowan. ‘Yet it became commercialized around the same time as Ronald Reagan’s remaking of America in 1984, where something that started as a countercultural hippie movement was completely co-opted.’ New Age became big business, leading to subsequent Halpern releases with oddly utilitarian titles like ‘Music for Your PC’ and ‘Attracting Prosperity,’ not to mention the international success of Enya, who has sold more than 75 million records worldwide.
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Three years ago I wrote a column about “perfect songs” and someone made a YouTube playlist with a bunch of them. Not sure about “perfect” but these are all at least “pretty good,” I think you will agree.
New Resonant Frequency today. It’s a bit of a departure, or maybe a return to the form of some of the earlier columns, in that there is more personal stuff here. I wrote about rap music, aggression, fear, Swans, more.
(Warning: there is some Odd Future content, but I didn’t want to call this an “Odd Future piece,” in part b/c the idea for this column has been germinating for about a year, and in part b/c I know and understand how sick everyone is of reading about them. Still, it’s there, a little bit.)
Essentially, this was my attempt to do something I mentioned a while back when Ann Powers’ “In Defense of Nasty Art” piece was going around, which is to write about having an attraction to music that doesn’t nec. fit with your image of yourself as a person. Instead of writing about why some people might be drawn to music with objectionable content or why the person creating it might be compelled to make it, I wanted to write about why I like it (and here I am not talking about Odd Future specifically, they’re actually a smaller part of this piece and I use their music to discuss something else), what it does for me, how it functions for me as a listener, how sometimes immersing myself in music where terrible things are happening can be a good thing for me.
So I also talk about my earliest interest in rap music, which was basically Run DMC when I was in high school, and how the aggressiveness of their music connected to something major in my life at that time, which was playing football. Oh yeah, I also wrote a little about playing football. This photo above is the one picture in the world that shows me doing that. I am the guy with his hands on the ball.
Is today. I hadn’t actually been to one of these before. I am in record stores a lot so the idea of fighting crowds didn’t really appeal to me. But my favorite shop in town, Laurie’s Planet of Sound, asked me to DJ for an hour as part of their festivities, and it was great fun. The store was packed and I really like everyone who works in the shop a lot (I am in there several times a week—it’s a block from my apartment). DJing, esp. when the pressure of getting people to dance is removed, is one of my favorite things in life. At one point my hands were shaking a little because I was so excited and happy. That was weird. Glad they asked me.
I thought of pulling some kind of theme together for my hour, but in the end I just played a bunch of songs that I love. Some I’ve discussed here recently. My guiding principal was, “What would I be excited to hear playing when I walk into a record store?” Here are my answers.
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